Shopping Bag

Spring/Summer 2015: The Cycle

The Cycle

Spring/Summer 2015

It’s a cold, dark midnight, and you find yourself walking down a quiet, motionless alleyway in Venice wielding a hammer stapler in your dominant hand. From your peripheral, a familiar man pulls up on his bike and leans it on a fence preparing to secure it with his lock. As you approach him you become enraged as you suddenly realize he's the guy who stole your bike last week. So, without hesitation, you smash your makeshift weapon aggressively across the side of his head. Yet somehow, instantaneously it is you that feels the pain.

So begins a new short film by Venice filmmaker Joey Indrieri. The plot came to the director after moving to Venice years ago and seeing how violence was perpetuated in the cycle of bicycle thefts and the desire for retribution in the neighborhood. His new short entitled ‘The Cycle’ is a poetic meditation on the sort of repetitive behaviors that can accidentally define us in our lives. The bicycle is just a vehicle for Indrieri’s story – the real conflict in the film is that of a failed relationship and how that can make a person lose sight of themselves. We see through the eyes of the man left behind, struggling to recognize himself and see the world clearly again.

‘The Cycle’ is dark in tone and aesthetic, but is so seductively filmed and executed that it becomes attractive and magnetic. It is a familiar quiet space that Indrieri has created in true collaboration with a lean but passionate crew, including DP Keith Picus, composer Alex Kemp, production manager and editor Tony Papa, and actors Justin Chatwin and Addison Timlin.

In the best experience of artwork, place and time dissolve. Feature films have the benefit of slowly drawing you into their climate. To capture your attention and transport your senses in under ten minutes is a true feat. To create this short, Indrieri partnered with producer Garrett Leight, owner of GLCO and the publisher of this magazine. Leight was hesitant to run this story about a film he financed in his own magazine, so like Emimen’s ‘Rabbit’ stealing his enemy’s ammunition in the epic final scene of Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile, I now call out the supposed weakness / conflict of interest in the interest of full disclosure.

What Leight is doing, out in the open as an entrepreneur who patronizes artists aligning with his brand, is a transparent version of a new trend in marketing more pervasive than one might imagine. Corporations have finally learned that people actually care about originality and the passion that artists bring to their work, and they want to use that. Artists with a more expansive understanding of patronage are now learning to turn this around to their own advantage. If the opposite of the now defunct term “sold out” is “bought in,” then artists are buying in for survival and owning the creative freedom that it ultimately provides for them.